 Chapter 4 Part 1 of Zone Policemen 88. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Kay Hand. Zone Policemen 88, a close-range study of the Panama Canal and its workers, by Harry A. Frank. Chapter 4 Part 1 One morning, early in March, the boss and I crossed the suspension bridge over the canal. A hand car and six husky-knee grows awaited us, and we were soon bumping away over temporary spurs through the jungle to strike at length the relocation opposite the giant tree near Basso Bispo that marked the northern limit of our district. The PRR, you will recall, has been operating across the Isthmus since 1855. When the United States took over the zone in 1904, it built a new double-tracked line of 5-foot gauge for nearly the whole 47 miles. Much of this, however, runs through territory soon to be covered by Gatun Lake. Nearly all of the rest of it is on the wrong side of the canal. An almost entirely new line, therefore, is being built through the Virgin Jungle on the South American side of the canal, which is to be the permanent line and is known in zone parlance as the relocation. This is 49 miles in length from Panama to Cologne and is single-track only, as freight traffic, especially, is expected, very naturally, to be lighter after the canal is opened. Already, that portion from the Chagras to the Atlantic has been put into use on February 15 to be exact, and the time was not far off when the section within our district from Gamboa to Pedro Miguel would also be in operation. That portion runs through the wilderness a mile or more back from the canal through jungle hills so dense with vegetation, one could only make one's way through it with the ubiquitous machete of the native jungle dweller, except where tiny trails appear that led to squatters thatched huts thrown together of tin, dynamite, and dry goods boxes, and jungle reeds in little scattered patches of clearing. Some of these hills have been cut half away for the new line. Great generous cuts, for to the giant 90-ton steam shovels, a few hundred cubic yards of earth more or less is of slight importance. All else is virtually impenetrable jungle. Travelers by rail across the isthmus, as no doubt many ships' passengers will be in the years to come while their seamer is being slowly raised and lowered to and from the 85-foot lake, we'll see little of the canal. A glimpse of the Basso Bispo cut at Gamboa and a little else from the time till they leave Gatun until they return to the present line at Pedro Miguel station. But in compensation they will see some wondrous jungle scenery, a tangled tropical wilderness with great masses of bushflowers of brilliant hues, gigantic ferns, countless palm and banana trees, wonderfully slender arrow-straight trees, rising smooth and branchless more than a hundred feet to end in an immense bouquet of brilliant purplish hue blossoms. The boss barely noticed these things. One quickly grows accustomed to them. Why Americans who have been down on the zone for a year don't know there's a palm tree on the isthmus? Or at least they do not remember there were no palm trees in Kiakuk, Iowa when they left there. Along this new graveled line, still unused except by work trains, we rode in our six Negro power car, dropping off in the gravel each time we caught sight of any species of human beings. Every little way was a gang, averaging some 30 men distinct in nationality. Antiguans shoveling gravel, martiniques snarling and quarreling as they wallowed thigh-deep in swamps and pools, a company of Greeks unloading trainloads of ties, Spaniards leisurely but steadily grating and surfacing, track bands of spagodes chopping away the aggressive jungle with their machetes. The one task at which the native Panamanian, or Colombian as many still call themselves, is worth his brass check. Every here and there we caught labor's odds and ends, diminutive water boys, likewise of varying nationality, a Negro switchboy dosing under the bit of shelter he had rigged up of jungle ferns, frightening many a black laborer speechless as we pounced upon him emerging from his soldiering in the jungle. Occasionally, even a native bushman on his way to market from his palm-thatched home generations old back in the bush, who has scarcely noticed yet that the canal is being dug, fell into our hands and was inexorably set down in spite of all protest until he could prove beyond question that he had already been taken or lived beyond his own line. Thus we scribbled incessantly on, even through the noon hour, dropping gangs one by one away from their tasks, shaking laborers out of the brief after lunch siesta in a patch of shade. The boss was hampered by having only two languages where ten were needed. In the early afternoon he went on to Paraiso to feed himself and the traction power while I held the fort. Soon after rain fell, a sort of advanced agent of the rainy season, a sudden tropical downpour that ran in rivulets down across the pink cardboards and my victims. Yet strange to note, the writing of the medium soft pencil remained as clear and unsmudged as in the driest weather, and so clean a rain was it that it did not even soil my white cotton shirt. I continued unheating, only to note with surprise a few minutes later that the sun was shining on the dense green jungle about me, as brilliantly as ever, and that I was dry again as when I had set out in the morning. The boss returned, and when I had eaten the crackers and the bottle of pink lemonade he brought, we pushed on toward the Pacific. Till at length in mid-afternoon we came to the top of the descent to Pedro Miguel and knew that the end of our district was at hand. So powerful was the breeze from the Atlantic that our six-man power engine sweated profusely as they toiled against it, even on the downgrade of the return to empire. Tuscotti had been assigned my empire recalls, and I had been given a new and virgin territory, namely the town of Paraiso. It lies somewhat back from the village street, that is, the PRR. Indeed, trains do not deign to notice its existence except on Sundays. But there is a temporary bridge over the canal with few engineers ventured to snake her across at any great speed, and the enumerator housed in empire need not even be a graduate hobo to be able to drop off there a bit after seven in the morning and prance away up the chamois path into the town. Wherever on the zone you aspire a town of two-story skeleton screened buildings scattered over hills with winding gravel roads and trees and flowers between, there you may be sure, live American gold employees. It's of how the canal commission had dodged the monotony you expected. Somehow they have broken up the grim lines that make so dismal the best intention to factory town. There are hints that the builders have heard somewhere of the science of landscape gardening. At times these same houses are deceiving for all ICC buildings bear a strong family resemblance, and it is only at the door that you know whether it is a bachelor's quarters, a family residence, or the supreme court. From the outside world, Priso scarcely draws a glance of attention, but once in it you find a whole zone town with all the accustomed paraphernalia of ICC hotel and commissary, hospital and police station, all ruled over and held in check by the famous colonel in command of the latter. Moreover, Priso will someday come again into her own when the relocation opens and brings her back on the main line. While proud Culebra and Haughty Empire, stranded on a rail-less shore of the canal, will wither and waste away, and even their broad, macadamide roads will sink beneath a second-growth jungle. Rensen had come to lend assistance. He set to work among the Negro cabins, the upper gallery seats of Priso's amphitheater of Hills. For Rensen had been a free agent for more than a month now and was not exactly in a condition to interview American housewives. My own task began down at the row of inhabited boxcars and so on through shacks and tenements with many Spanish laborer's wives. Then toward noon the labor train screamed in with two gold coaches and many open cattle cars with long benches jammed with sweaty workmen, easily six hundred men in the six cars, who swept in upon the town like a flood through a suddenly opened sluice way as the train barely paused and shrieked away again. Rensen and I dashed for the laborer's mess halls where hundreds of sun-bronst foreigners divided only as to color, packed pal mel around a score of wooden tables heavily stocked with rough and tumble food, yet so different from the old French catch as catch can days when each man owned his black pot and toiled all through the noon hour to cook himself an unsanitary lunch. We jotted them down at express speed with changes of tongue so abrupt that our heads were soon reeling and in the place where our mind should have been sounded only a confused chaotic uproar like a wrangling within the covers of a polyglot dictionary. Then suddenly I landed a Russian. It was the final straw. I like to speak Spanish. I can endure the creaking of Turks attempting to talk Italian. I can bend an ear to the excruciating fringe of Martinique Negroes. I have boldly faced sputtering Arabs, but I will not run the risk of talking Russian. It was the second and last case during my census days when I was forced to call for interpretive assistance. At best we caught only a small percentage at each table before the crowd had wolfed and melted away. An odd half dozen more perhaps we found stretched out in the shade under the mess hall in neighboring quarters before the imperative screech of the labor train whistle ended a scene that must be several times repeated and now left a silent and alone to wander wet and weary to the nearest white bachelor's quarters there to lie on our backs an hour or more till the polyglot jumble of words in the back of our heads had each climbed again to its proper shelf. Speaking of white bachelor quarters, they are in Leithy and Numerator's greatest problem. The Spaniard or the Jamaican is in nine cases out of ten fluently familiar with his companion's antecedents and pedigree. He can generally furnish all the information of census department calls for, but it is quite otherwise with the American bachelor. He may know his roommate's exact degree of skill at poker. He probably knows his private opinion of the colonel. He is sure to know his degree of enmity to the prohibition movement, but he is not at all certain to know his name and rarely indeed has he the shadow of a notion when and in what particular corner of the states he began the game of existence. So lose our ties down on the zone that a man's roommate might go off into the jungle and die and the former not dream of inquiring for him for a week. Especially we world wanderers as are the large percentage of zoners with virtually no fixed roots in any soil. Floating wherever the job suggests or the spirit moves have the facts of our past in our own heads only. No wanderer of experience would dream of asking his fellow where he came from. The answer would be too apt to be from the last place. So difficult the this matter become that I gave up rushing for the bus to Pedro Miguel each evening and the even more distressing necessity of catching that premature 6.30 train each morning in empire and packing a sheet and pillow and toothbrush moved down to Pariso that I might spend the first half of the night in quest of these elusive bits of bachelor information. Meanwhile the enrolling by day continued unabated. I had my first experience enumerating gold married quarters, white American families just enough for experience and not enough to suffer severely. The enrolling of West Indians was pleasanter. The wives of locomotive engineers and steam shovel crane men were not infrequently supercilious ladies who resented being disturbed during their social functions and lacked the training and politeness of Jamaican mammies. Living in paradise now under parental all providing government they seem to have forgotten the rolling pin days of the past. It was here in Pariso that I first encountered the strange, the wondrous, strange custom of lying about one's age. Negro women never did. What more absurd uncalled for peace of dishonesty? Does Mrs. Smith fear that Mrs. Jones next door will succeed in pumping out of me that capital bit of information? Little does she know the long prison sentence at hard labor that stares me in the face for any such slip to say nothing of my naturally incommunicative disposition. Or is she ashamed to let me know the truth? Unaware that all such information goes in at my ears and down my pencil to the pink card before me like a message over the wires, leaving no more trace behind. Surely she must know that I care not a pencil point whether she is 18 or 52, nor remember which one minute after her screen door has slammed behind me, unless she has caused me to glance up and wonder at her silvering temples of 35 when she simpers 22, and to set her down at 40 to be on the safe side. Oh, now please, ladies, do not understand me as accusing the American wives of Pariso in general of this weakness. The large majority were quite pleasant, frank, and overflowing with cheery good sense. But the percentage who were not was far larger than I, who am also an American, was pleased to find it. But doubly astonishing were the few cases of lying by proxy. A clean-cut college-graduated civil engineer of 32, whom one would have cited as an example of the best type of American, gave all data concerning himself in an un-impeachable manner. His wife was absent. When the question of her age arose he gave it with the slightest catch in his voice as 20. Now that might be all very well. Men of 32 are occasionally so fortunate as to marry girls of 20. But a moment later the gentleman in question finds himself announcing that his wife has been living on the zone with him since 1907 and that she was born in New England. Thus is he tripped over his own clothesline. For New England girls do not marry at 15. Mother would not let them, even if they would. I too had gradually worked my way high up among the nondescript cabins on the upper rim of Periso that seemed on the very verge of pitching headlong into the noisy, smoky canal far below with the jar of the next explosion. When one sunny mid-afternoon I caught sight of Rensen dejectedly trudging down across what might be called the Maiden of Periso back of the two-story lodge hall. I took leave of my ebony hostess and descended. Rensen's troubles were indeed disheartening. Back in the jungled fringe of town he had fallen into a swarm of martiniques and Rensen's French being nothing more than an unstudied mixture of English and Spanish he had not gathered much information. Moreover, Negro women for their French aisles are enough to frighten any virtuous young marine. What's the sense of me trying to chew the fat in French? said Rensen with tears in his voice. I am in no condition to work at this census business any longer anyway. I ain't got to bed before three in a morning this week. In his air was open suggestion that it was someone else's fault. Someday I'll be getting in bad too. This morning a full-nigger woman asked me if I didn't want her black pickin' any. I was enumeratin' thinking it was a good joke. You know how these bush kids is runnin' around all over the country before a white man's brat can walk on his hind legs. Yes, I says if I was going to alligate or huntin' a needed bait. I came near catching that brat up by the feet and beatin' its can off. Not a luck, anyway, and... The fact is, Rensen was aching to be fired. More than thirty days had he been subject only to his own will and it was high time he returned to the nursery discipline of camp. Moreover, he was out of cigarettes. I slipped him one and smoothed him down as its fumes grew. For Rensen was tractable as a child, rightly treated, and set him to taking Jamaican tenements in the center of town while I struck off into the jungled Martinique Hills myself. There were signs abroad that the census job was drawing to a close. My first payday had already come and gone and I had strolled up the gravel walk one noonday to the disembursing office with my yellow pay certificate duly initialed by the examiner of accounts and was handed my first four twenty-dollar gold pieces. For hotel and commissary books, sadly, reduced a good paycheck. Already one evening I had entered the census office to find the boss, just peeling off his sweat-dripping undershirt and dotted with skin-pricking jungle life after a day mule-back on the thither side of the canal. An utterly fruitless day for not only had he failed during eight hours of plunging through the wilderness to find a single hut, not already decorated with the enumerated tag, but not even a banana could he lay hands on when the noon hour overhauled him far from the administrations of Ben and the breeze-swept veranda of Empire Hotel. It was, I believe, the afternoon following Rensen's linguistic troubles that the boss came jogging into Parisso on his sturdy mule. In his eagerness to clean up the territory, we felt corralling negroes everywhere, in the streets, at work, buying their supplies at the commissary, sleeping in the shade of wayside trees, anywhere and everywhere, until, at last in his excitement, the boss let his medium soft pencil slip by the column for color and dashed down the abbreviation for mixed after the question. Married or single, which may have been near enough the truth of the case, but suggested it was time to quit. So we marked Parisso, finished except for recalls and returned to Empire. One by one hour fellow enumerators had dropped by the wayside, some by mutual agreement, some without any agreement whatever. Rensen was now relieved from census duty to his great joy. There remained but four of us, the boss and Mac in the office, Scotty and I outside. A deep conference ensued and, as if I had not had good luck enough already, it was decided that we too should go through the cut itself. It was like offering us a salary to view all the great work in detail, for virtually all the excavation of any importance on the zone lay within the confines of our district. So one day Scotty and I descended at the girderless railroad bridge and taking each one side of the canal set out to canvas its every nook and cranny. The canal as it then stood was about the width of two city blocks, an immense chasm piled and tumbled with broken rock and earth. In the center a ditch already filled with grimy water. On either side several levels of rough rock ledges with sheer rugged stone faces. For the hills were being cut away in layers, each far above the other. High above us rose the jagged walls of the cut with towns hanging by their fingernails all along its edge and ahead in the abysmal, smoky distance the great channel gashed through Calubra Mountain. End of Chapter 4 Part 1 Chapter 4 Part 2 of Zone Policemen 88 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Kay Hand Zone Policemen 88 a close range study of the Panama Canal and its workers by Harry A. Frank Chapter 4 Part 2 The different levels varied from 10 to 20 feet one above the other, each with a railroad on it back and forth along which incessantly rumbled and screeched dirt trains full or empty, halting before the steam shovels that shivered and spouted thick black smoke as they ate away the rocky hills and cast them in great giant hands full on the train of one-sided flat cars that moved forward bit by bit at the flourish of the conductor's yellow flag. Steam shovels that seemed human in all except their mammoth fearless strength tore up the solid rock with snorts of rage and the panting of industry now and then flinging some troublesome, stubborn boulder angrily upon the cars. Yet they could be dainty as human fingers too could pick up a railroad spike or push a rock gently an inch further across the car. Each was run by two white Americans or at least what would prove such when they reached the shower bath in their quarters. The Crainman, far out on the shovel arm the engineer within the machine itself with a labyrinth of levers demanding his unbroken attention. Then there was of course a gang of Negroes, firemen and the like attached to each shovel. All the day through I climbed and scrambled back and forth between the different levels dodging from one track to another and along the rocky floor of the canal needing eyes and ears both in front and behind not merely for trains but for a hundred hidden and unknown dangers to keep the nerves taught. Now and then a palatial motor car like some railroad breed of taxi spread by with its musical insistent jingling bells usually with one of the countless parties of government guests or tourists in spotless white which the dry season brings. Dirt trains kept the right of way however for the work always comes first at Panama or it might be the famous yellow car itself with members of the commission. Once it came all but empty and there dropped off inconspicuously a man in baggy duck trousers a black alpaca coat of many wrinkles and an unassuming straw hat a white-haired man with blue almost babyish blue eyes a cigarette dangling from his lips as he strolled about with restless yet quiet energy. There has been no flash and glitter of military uniforms on the zone since the French sailed for home but everyone knew the colonel for all that the soldier who has never seen service ordered the shrapnel screen by overhead yet to whom the world owes more thanks than six conquering generals rolled into one. Scores of tripod and star drills whole battalions of deafening machines run by compressed air brought from miles away are pounding and grinding and jamming holes in the living rock. After them will presently come nonchalantly strolling along gangs of the ubiquitous black powder men and carelessly throw down boxes of dynamite and pound the drill holes full thereof and tamp them down ready to blow at 11.30 and 5.30 when the workmen are out of range. Those mighty explosions that twelve times a week set the porch chairs of every ICC house on the isthmus to rocking and are heard far out at sea. Anywhere near the drills is such a roaring and jangling that I must bellow at the top of my voice to be heard at all. The entire gamut of sound waves surrounds and enfolds me and with it all the powerful Atlantic breeze sending me through the channel. Down in the bottom of the canal if one step behind anything that shuts off the breeze it is tropically hot. Yet up on the edge of the chasm above the trees are always knotting and bowing before the ceaseless wind from off the Caribbean. Scores of switcher ruse drows under their sheet iron wigwams erected not so much as protection from the sun for the drowsers are mostly negroes and immune to that as from young rocks that the dynamite blasts frequently toss a quarter mile. Then over it all hang heavy clouds of soft cold dust from trains and shovels shifting down upon the black, white and mixed and the enumerator alike a dirty noisy, perilous, enjoyable job. Everywhere are gangs of men sometimes two or three gangs working together the same task. Shovel gangs, track gangs, surfacing gangs, dynamite gangs gangs doing everything imaginable with shovel and pick and crowbar gangs down on the floor of the canal gangs far up the steep walls of cut rock gangs stretching away in either direction till those far off look like upright bands of the leaf cutting ants of Panamanian jungles gangs nearly all whatever their nationality in the blue shirts and khaki trousers of the zone commissary giving a peculiar color scheme to all the scene. Now and then the boss is a stony eyed American with a black cigar clamped between his teeth. More often he is of the same nationality as other workers quite likely from the same town who jabbers a little imitation English. Which is one of the reasons why a force of time inspectors is constantly dodging in and out over the job time book and pencil in hand lest some fellow townsmen of the boss be earning his $1.50 a day under the shade of a tree back in the jungle. Here are Basques and their boinas preferring their native Esquara to Spanish. French niggers and English niggers is to the interest of peace in order to keep as far apart as possible. Occasionally a few sunburn blond men in a shovel gang, but they prove to be tutans or Scandinavians laborers of every color and degree except American laborers more than conspicuous by their absence. For the American Negro is an untractable creature in large numbers and the caste system that forbids white Americans from engaging in common labor side by side with Negroes is to be expected in an enterprise of which the leaders are not only military men but largely southerners, however many may be shivering in the streets of Chicago or roaming hungrily through the byways of St. Louis. It is well so perhaps. None of us who feels an affection for the zone would wish to see its atmosphere lowered from what it is to the brutal depths of our railroad construction camps in the states. The attention of certain state legislatures might advantageously be called to the zone's Spaniard's drinking cup. It is really a tin can on the end of a long stick cover and all. The top is a punched sieve-like that the water may enter as it is dipped in the bucket with which the water-boy strains along. In the bottom is a single small hole out of which spurts into the drinker's mouth a little stream of water as he holds it high above his head. As once he drank wine from his leather boat and far off Spain. Many a Spanish gang comes entirely from the same town notably Salamanca or Avila. I set them to staring and chattering by some simple remark about their birthplace. Fine Vu from the Paseo del Rostro, eh? Does the Puente Romano still cross the river? But I had soon to see such personalities for Pix and Shovelsley Idol as long as I remained in sight and Uncle Sam was the loser. So many were the gangs that I advanced barely half a mile during this first day and lost in my work forgot the hour until it was suddenly recalled by the insistent strident tooting of whistles that forewarns the setting off of the dynamite charges from the little red electric boxes along the edge of the cut. I turned back towards Pariso and all but stumbling over little red wild wires everywhere on the ground dodging in and out running forward halting or suddenly retreating I worked my way gradually forward while all the world about me was up heaving and spouting and belching forth to the heavens as if I had been caught in the crater of a volcano as it suddenly erupted without warning. The history of Panama is strewn with dynamite stories. Even the French had theirs in their sixteen percent of the excavation of Culebra. In American annals there is one for every week. Three days before one of my empire friends set off one afternoon for a stroll through the cuts he had not seen for a year. In a retired spot he came upon two Negroes pounding an irregular bundle. What are you doing boys? He inquired with idle curiosity. Just a brellin up this year dynamite boss languidly answered one of the blacks. My friend was one of those apprehensive over cautious fellows so rare on the zone. Without so much as taking his leave he set off at a run. Some two car lengths beyond an explosion pitched him forward and all but lifted him off his feet. When he looked back the Negroes had left. Indeed neither of them has reported for work since. Then there was Mack's case. In his ambition for census efficiency Mack was in the habit of stopping workmen wherever he met them. One day he encountered a Jamaican carrying a box of dynamite on his head and according to his customs shouted hey boy had your census taken yet. What that boss? Cryed the Jamaican with wide open eyes as he threw the box at Mack's feet and stood at respectful attention. Somehow Mack lacked a bit of his old zealousness thereafter. On the second day I pushed past Kukaracha scene of the greatest slide in the history of the canal when 47 acres went into the cut burying under untold tons of earth and rock steam shovels and railroads. Star and tripod drills and all else in sight except the rough necks who are far too fast on their feet to be buried against their will. One by one I dragged shovel gangs away to a distance where my shouting could be heard. One by one I commanded drill men to shut off their deafening machines. All day I dodged switching snorting trains hammered by steep rocky paths or ladders from one level to another howling above the roar of the cut the time worn questions straining my ear to catch the answer. Many a negro did not know the meaning of the word census and must have it explained to him in words of one syllable. Many a time I climbed to some lofty rock ledge lined with drills and gesticulating like a semaphore in signal practice caught at last the wandering attention of a negro to shout sorethroated above the incessant pounding of machines and the roaring of the Atlantic breeze. Hello boy census taken yet. A long stare then at last perhaps the answer, oh yes sub-ass when and where in Spanish town Jamaica three years ago sa which was not an attempt to be facetious but an answer in all seriousness why should not one census like one baptism suffice for a lifetime? Unfortunate to that enumerators were not accustomed to carry deadly weapons. Quick changes from negro to Spanish gangs demonstrated beyond all future question how much more native intelligence has the white man. Rarely did I need to ask a Spaniard a question twice still less ask him to repeat the answer. His replies came back sharp and swift as a pelota from a cesta. West Indians not only must hear the question an average of three times but could seldom give information clearly enough to be intelligible though ostensibly speaking English a Spanish card one might fill out and be gone in less time than the negro could be roused from his racial torpor yet of the Spaniards on the zone surely 70% were wholly illiterate while the negroes from the British West Indies thanks to their good fortune in being ruled over by the world's best colonist could almost invariably read and write many of those shoveling in the cut have been trained in trigonometry. Few are the zoners now who do not consider the Spaniard the best workman ever imported in all the 65 years from the railroad surveying to the completion of the canal. The stocky muscle bound little fellows come no longer to America as conquistadors but to shovel dirt and yet more cheery willing workers more law abiding subjects are scarcely to be found. It is unfortunate we could not have imported Spaniards for all the canal work even they have naturally learned some soldiering from example of lazy negroes who where laborers must be had are a bit better than no labor though not much. The third day came and high above me towered the rock cliffs of Caluyabra's Palm Crown Hill steam shovels approaching the summit in echelon here and there in incipient earth and rock slide dribbling warningly down. He who still fancies the digging of the canal and ordinary task should have tramped with us through just our section halting to speak to every man in it climbing out of this man-made canon twice a day a strenuous climb even near its end while at Caluyabra one looks up at all but unscalable mountain walls on either side. From time to time we hear murmurs from abroad that Americans are making light of catastrophes on the isthmus that they cover up their great disasters by a strict censorship of news. The latter is mere absurdity as the catastrophes a great slide or premature dynamite explosion are serious disaster to Americans on the job just as they would be to Europeans. But whereas the continental European would sit down before the misfortune and weep, the American swears a round oath spits on his hands and pitches in to shovel the slide out again. He isn't belittling the disasters it is merely that he knows the canal has got to be dug and goes ahead and digs it. That is the greatest thing on the zone amid all the childish snarling of spigoties, the backbiting of Europe, the congressional wrangles of cabinet politics, the man on the job, the colonel, the average American, the roughneck, goes right on digging the canal day by day as if he had never heard a rumor of all this outside noise. Mighty is the job from one point of view yet tiny from another. With all his enormous equipment, his peerless ingenuity and his feverish activity all little man has succeeded in doing is to scratch a little surface wound in Mother Earth, cutting in a few superficial veins of water that trickled down the rocky face of the cut. By March 12 we had carried our task past and under Empire Suspension Bridge and the end of the cut was almost in sight. That day I clawed and scrambled a score of times up the face of rock walls. I zigzagged through long rows of negroes pounding holes in rock ledges. I stumbled and splashed my way through gangs of martinique muckers. I slid down the face of government made cliffs on the seat by commissary breeches. I fought my way up again to stalk through long lines of men picking away at the dizzy edge of sheer precipices. I rolled down in the sand in rubble of what threatened to develop into slides. I crawled under snorting steam shovels to drag out besuited negroes. Negroes so besuited I had to ask them their color. While dodging the gigantic swinging shovel itself, to say nothing of dehobe blasts and rocks of the size of drummers trunks that spilled from it as it swung. I climbed up into the quivering monster itself to interpret the engineer at his levers to shout at the crane man on his beam. I sprang aboard every train that was not running at full speed, walking along the running board into the cab, if not to get the engineer at least to gain new life from his private ice water tank. I scrambled over tenders and quarter miles of ligerwood flats piled high with broken rock and earth to scream at the American conductor and his black breakman, often to find myself, by the time I had set down one of them, carried entirely out of my district to Pedro Miguel or beyond the Chagra, to have to hit the grit in hobo fashion and catch something back to the spot where I left off. In short, I poked into every corner of the cut known to man bawling in the November 1st voice of a presidential candidate to everything in trousers, hey, Adjish sense is taken yet. And what was my reward? From the northern edge of empire to where the cut sinks away into the Chagra and the low flat country beyond, I enrolled just 13 persons. It was then and there, though it still lacked an hour of noon, that I ceased to be a sense's enumerator. With slow and deliberate step, I climbed out of the canal and across a path to field to Bassa Biscoe. In sitting down in the shade of her station, patiently awaited the train that would carry me back to empire. 4,667 zone residents had I enrolled during those six weeks. Something over half of these were Jamaican. Of the states, Pennsylvania was best represented. Martinique Negros, Greeks, Spaniards and Panamanians were some 80% illiterate. Of some 300 of the first, only a half dozen even claimed to read and write and non-wedlock was virtually universal among them. Rumor has it that there are 72 separate states and dependencies represented on the list of citizens. My own cards showed a few less. Most conspicuous absences, besides American Negros were natives of Honduras, of four countries of South America, of most of Africa and of the entire Australia. That this was largely due to chance was shown by the fact that my fellow enumerators found persons from all these countries. I had enrolled persons born in the following places. All the United States except three or four States in the far Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Canal Zone, Colombia, Venezuela, British Guiana, de Marara, French and Dutch Guiana, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, Cuba, Haiti, and Santo Domingo, Jamaica, Barbados, St. Vincent, Trinidad, Lucia, Montserrat, Dominica, Nevis, Nassau, Eleutheria, Aninagua, Martinique, Guadalupe, St. Thomas, Danish West Indies, Curacao and Tobago, England, Ireland, Scotland, Holland, Finland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Russia, France, Spain, Indora, Portugal, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Greece, Serbia, Turkey, Canary Islands, Syria, Palestine, Arabia, India, from Tutokorin to Lahore, China, Japan, Egypt, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and the high seas. Where are you born, boy? I had run across a wrinkled old Negro who had worked more than 30 years for the PRR. Did I don't know, boss? Oh, come. Don't you know where you were born? For God, boss, I was telling you the truth. I don't know because I was born to see. Well, what country are you a subject of? Truly, I can't say, boss. Well, what nationality was your father? I never see him, son. Well, then, where the devil did you first land after you were born? Did I can't say, boss? Tinket were one of them islands. Recognize a subject of the world, boss. Weeks afterward, the population of Uncle Sam's 10 by 50 mile strip of tropics was found to have been on February 1st, 1912, 62,810. No, anxious reader, I am not giving away inside information. The source of my remarks is the public prints. Of these, about 25,000 were British subjects. West Indian Negroes with very few exceptions. The entire population, 37,428 were employed by the U.S. government. Of white Americans, of the Brahmin caste of the gold rule, there were employed on the zone, but 5,228. End of Chapter 4, Part 2 Chapter 5, Part 1, of Zone Policemen 88. Police headquarters presented an unusual air of preoccupation next morning. In the corner office, the telephone rang often and imperatively. Several times, erect figures in khaki and broad Texas hats flashed by the doorway. The drone of Ernest Conference sounded a few minutes, and the figures flashed suddenly out again into the world. In the inner office, I glanced once more in review through the rules and regulations. The zone, too, was now familiar ground, and as for the third requirement for a policeman, to know to zone residents by sight, a strange face brought me to a start of surprise, unless it beamed above the garb the chouted tourist. Now all I needed was a few hours of conference and explanation on the duties, rights, and privileges of policemen, and that, of course, would come as soon as leisure again settled down over headquarters. Musing, which I was suddenly startled to my feet by the captain appearing in the doorway. Catch the next train to Balboa, he said. You've got four minutes. You'll find Lieutenant Long on board. Here are the people to look out for. He thrust into my hands a slip of paper. From another direction there was tossed at me a new brass check and first-class private, police badge number 88, and I was racing down through Encon. In the meadow below the Trevoli, I risked time to glance at the piece of paper. On it were the names of an ex-president and two ministers of a frowsy little South American republic during whose rule a former president and his henchmen had been brutally murdered by a popular uprising in the very capital itself. In the first-class coach I found Lieutenant Long, towering so far above all his surroundings as to have been easily recognized even had he not been in uniform. Beside him set Corporal Castillo of the plain clothes squad, a young man of forty with a high forehead, a stubby black mustache, and a chin that was decisive without being aggressive. Now here's the captain's idea, explained the Lieutenant as the train swung away around Encon Hill. We'll have to take turns mounting guard over them, of course. I'll have to talk Spanish and nobody'll have to look at Castillo more than once to know he was born in some crack in the Andes, which was one of Lieutenant's jokes, for the Corporal, lower Colombian, was as white, sharp-witted, and energetic as any American on the zone. But no one to look at him would suspect that, for French is it? Frank. Oh, yes, that Frank could speak Spanish. We'll do our best to inflate that impression, and when it comes your turn at Guard Mount you can probably let several things of interest drift in at your ears. I left headquarters before the captain had time to explain, I suggested. Oh, said the Lieutenant. Well, here it is in a spectacle case, as our friend Kipling would put it. We're on our way to Calabra Island. There are now in quarantine there three men who arrived yesterday from South America. They are members of the party of the murdered president. Today there will arrive, and also be put in hawk, the three gents whose names you have there. Now we have a private inside hunch that the three already here have come up particularly and specifically to prepare for the funeral of the three who are arriving, which is no hair off our brows except it's up to us to see they don't pull off any little stunts of that kind on zone territory. At least this police business was starting well. If this was a sample, it would be a real job. The train had stopped, and we were climbing up the steps of Balboa police station without the cooperation of the Admiral of the Pacific Fleet we could not reach Calabra Island. By the way, I suppose you're well armed. Asked the Lieutenant in his high-crawlous voice, as we drank a last round of ice water preparatory to setting out again. Um, I've got a fountain pen, I replied. I haven't been a policeman twenty minutes yet, and I was appointed in a hurry. Fine! cried the Admiral sarcastically, snatching open the door of a closet beside the desk. With a warm job like this on hand. You know what these South Americans are. With a wink at the Lieutenant that was meant also for Castillo, who stood with his felt hat on the back of his head and a faraway look in his eyes. Yeah, mighty dangerous! Around mealtime, said the Corporal, though at the same time he drew from a hip pocket a worn leather holster containing a revolver and examined it intently. Meanwhile the Admiral had handed me a massive number eighty-eight colt with holster, a box of cartridges, and a belt that might easily have served as a horse's saddle girth. When I had buckled it on under my coat the Ironman felt like a small boy clinging about my waist. We trooped on down a sort of railroad junction with a score of abandoned wooden houses. It was here I had first landed on the zone one blazing Sunday nearly two months before and trapped away for some miles on a rusty sandy track along a canal already filled with water till a short jungle path led me into my first zone town. Already that seemed ancient history. The police launch, manned by Negro prisoners with the Admiral and a cushioned armchair at the wheel, was soon scutting away across the sunlit harbor, the breakwater building of the spoiled-the-collabor cut on our left, ahead the cluster of small islands being torn to pieces for Uncle Sam's fortifications. The steamer being not yet sighted, we put in at Dallas Island, where the bulky policemen in charge led us to dinner at the ICC Hotel, during which the noonday blasting on the zone came dull across to us. Soon after we were landing at the cement sidewalk of the island, where I had been a prisoner for a day in January as my welcome to U.S. Territory, and were being greeted by the pocket-addition doctor and the Bay Window German who had been my wardens on that occasion. We found the conspirators at a table in a corridor of the first-class quarantine station, and the words of Lieutenant Long, they fully looked the part, being of distinctly merciless cut of jib. They were roughly dressed and without collars, convincing proof of some nefarious design, for when the Latin American entitled to wear them leaves off his white collar and his cane, he must be desperate indeed. We braced them at once, marching down upon them as they were murmuring with heads together over a mass of typewritten sheets. The corporal was delegated to inform them in his most urbane and hilligaseco castilian that we were well acquainted with their errand and that we were come to frustrate by any legitimate means in our power the consummation of any such project on American Territory. On the first paralyzed stare of astonishment that plans I had fancied block to their own breasts were known to others was somewhat cited, one of them assumed spokesmanship. In just as courtly and super-abundant language he replied that they were only too well aware of the inadvisability of carrying out any act against its sovereignty on U.S. soil. That so long as they were on American Territory they would conduct themselves in a most circumstect and calibroso manner. But he concluded, in the most public street of Panama City the first time we meet those three dogs we shall spit in their faces. That's all, not of us. And the blazing eyes announced all too plainly what he meant by that figure of speech. That was all very well, was our smiling urbane reply. But to be on the safe side and merely as a matter of custom we were under the unfortunate necessity of requesting them to submit to the annoyance of having their baggage in persons examined with a view to discovering what weapons como non senoris, out of the examination you desire, which was exceedingly kind of them. Whereupon when the lieutenant had interpreted to me their permission we fell upon them and amid countless expressions of mutual esteem gave them and their baggage such a frisking as befalls a kai fair leaving a South African diamond mind and found them armed with a receipt from the quarantine doctor for one pearl handled Smill and Wilson number 32. Either they really intended to postpone their little fare until they reached Panama or they had succeeded in concealing their weapons elsewhere. The doctor and his assistant were already being wrote out to the steamer that was to bring the victims. They were to be lodged in a room across the corridor from the conspirators, which corridor it would be our simple duty to patrol with a view to intercepting any exchange of stray lead. We felt a planning such division of the 24 hours as should give me the most talkative period. The lieutenant took the trouble further to convince the trio of my total ignorance of Spanish by distinct and elaborate explanation in English of the difference between the words Muchacho and Muchacha. Then we wandered down past the grimy steered station to the shore end of the little wharf to await the doctor and our protégés. The ocean breeze swept unhampered across the island on its rocky shore sounded the dull rumble of waves for the sea was rolling a bit now. The swelling tide covered inch by inch a sandy ridge that connected us with another island gradually drowning beneath its waters several rusty old hulls. A little rocky wooded aisle to the left cut off the future entrance to the canal. Some miles away across the bay on the lower slope of a long hill drows the city of Panama in brilliant sunshine and beyond the hazy mountainous country stretched southwestward to be lost in the molten horizon. On a distant hill some Indian was burning off a patch of jungle to plant his corn. Meanwhile the lieutenant in the corporal had settled some lumbroso proposition and fallen to reciting poetry. The former, who was evidently a lover of melancholy mouth-filling verse, was declaiming the raven to the open sea. I listened in wonder. Was this then police talk? I had expected rough, untaught fellows whose conversation at best would be pornographic rather than poetic. My astonishment swelled to the bursting point when the Colombian not only caught up the poem where the lieutenant left off, but topped it off with that peerless translation by Bernard de Venezuelan, beginning And just then the quarantine launch swung around the neighboring island. I tied into my horse-belt and dragged the colt around within easy reach, and a moment later the doctor and his bulking understudy stepped ashore. Alone. They didn't come, said the former. They were not allowed to leave their own country. Hell and damn nation! said the lieutenant at length in a calm conversational tone of voice, with the air of a small boy who has been wantonly robbed of a long-promised holiday, but who is determined not to make a scene over it. The corporal seemed indifferent, and stood with a faraway look in his eyes as if he were already busy with some other plans of worries. But then the corporal was married. As for myself, I had somehow felt from the first that it was too good to be true. Adventure has steadily dogged me all my days. Half-hour later we were pitching across the bay toward Ancon Hill, scaled bare on one end by the work of fortification like a Hindu haircut. The water came spinning inboard now and then, and dejected silence reigned within the craft. But spirits gradually revived, and before we could make out the details of the wharf, the corporal's hardy genuine laughter and the lieutenant's rousing cacahata were again drifting across the water. At Balboa, I unburdened myself of my shooting hardware and, catching the labor trade, was soon mounding the graveled walk to Ancon police station. In the second-story squadroom of the bungalow were eight beds, for there were more than enough policemen to go around, and the legal occupant of the bunk I fell asleep in returned from duty at midnight, and I transferred to the still warm nest of a man on the graveyard shift. It's custom to put a man in uniform for a while first before assigning him to play in closed duty, the inspector was saying next morning when I finished the oath of office that had been omitted in the haste of my appointment, why do we have waived that in your case, because of the knowledge of the zone the senses must have given you? Thus casually was I robbed of the opportunity to display my manly form in uniform to tourists of the trains and the trivoli, tourists, I say, because the zoners would never have noticed it, but we must all accept the decrees of fate. That was the full extent of the inspector's remarks, no mention whatever of the sundry little points the recruit is anxious to be enlightened upon. In government jobs one learns those details by experience, for the time being there was nothing for me to do but to descend to the gumshoe desk in Ancon station and sit in a swivel chair opposite Lieutenant Long waiting for orders. Towards noon a thought struck me, I swung the telephone around and got the inspector. All my junk is up an empire yet, I remarked. All right, tell the deskman down there to make you ought to pass, or hold the wire. As long as you're going out, there is a prisoner over in Panama that belongs up an empire. Go over and tell the chief you want Taofolano. I worked my way through the fawning, neck craning, mini-shaded mob of political henchmen and obsequious petitioners into the sacred hushed precincts of Panama police headquarters. A pouch spaghetti with a sifty eye behind large bowed glasses, vainly striving to exude dignity and wisdom, received me with the oily smirk of the Panamanian office holder who feels the painful necessity of keeping on outwardly good terms with all Americans. I flashed my badge and mentioned a name. A few moments later there was presented to me a sturdy, if somewhat flabby, young Spaniard carefully dressed and perfumed. We bowed like lifelong acquaintances, and stepping down to the street entered a cab. The prisoner, which he was now only a name, was a muscular fellow with whom I should have fared badly in personal combat. I was wholly unarmed and in a foreign land. All these sundry little unexplained points of a policeman's duty were bubbling up within me. When the prisoner turned to remark it was a warm day, should I warn him that anything he said would be used against him? When he ordered the driver to halt before the panel zone, that he might speak to some friends, should I fiercely counterman the order? What was my duty when the friends handed him some money and a package of cigars? Suppose he should start to follow his friends inside to have a drink? But he didn't. We drove languidly on down the avenue and up into Ancon, where I heaved a genuine sigh of relief as we crossed the unmarked street that made my badge good again. The prisoner was soon behind padlocks and the money and cigars in the station safe. These and him and the transfer card I took again with me into the foreign republic in time for the evening train. But he seemed even more anxious than I to attract no attention, and once an empire requested that we take the shortest and most inconspicuous route to the police station, and my responsibility was soon over. Many were the ZP fax I picked up during the next few days in the swivel chair. The zone police force of 1912 consisted of a chief of police, an assistant chief, two inspectors, four lieutenants, eight sergeants, 20 corpals, 117 first class policemen, and 116 policemen. West Indian Negroes without exception, though none but an American citizen was fired to any white position. Not to mention five clerks at headquarters who are quite worth the mentioning. Policemen wore the same uniform as first class officers, with khaki covered helmet instead of Texas hat, and canvas instead of leather leggings, drew one half the pay of a white private, were not eligible for advancement, and with some few notable exceptions were noted for what they did know and the facility with which they could not learn. One inspector was in charge of detective work, and the other an overseer of the uniformed force. Each of the lieutenants was in charge of one fourth of the zone with headquarters respectively at Ancon, Empire, Gorgona, and Cristobal, and the substations within these districts in charge of sergeants, corpals, or experienced privates according to importance. Years ago when things were yet in primeval chaos, and the memorable 6th of February, 1904 was still well above the western horizon, there was gathered together for the protection of the newly born canal strip, a band of bad men from our ferocious southwest warranted to feed on criminals each breakfast time, and in command of a man-eating roughrider. But somehow the bad men seemed unable to transplant to this new and richer soil, the banefulness which had thrived so successfully in the land of sagebrush and cactus. The gormandizing promised to be chiefly at the criminal tables, and before long it was noted that the noxious gentlemen were gradually drifting back to their native sand dunes, and the roughriding gave way to a more orderly style of horsemanship. Then, bit by bit, some men, just men, without any qualifying adjective whatever, began to get mixed up in the matter, one after another army lieutenants were detailed to help the thing along, until by and by they got the right army lieutenant and the right men and the ZP grouped what it is today, not the love perhaps, but the pride of every zoner whose name cannot be found on some old blotter. There are a number of ways of getting on the force. There is the broad and general highway of being appointed in Washington and shipped down like a nice fresh vegetable in the original package, and delivered just as it left the garden without the pollution of alien hands. Then there's the big impressive broad-shouldered fellow with some life and military service behind him, and the papers to prove it, who turns up on the zone and can't help getting on if he takes the trouble to climb to the headquarters. Or there are the special cases, like Marley for instance. Marley blew in one summer day from some uncharted point of the compass with nothing but his hat and a winning smile on his brassie features, and naturally soon drifted up the thousand stairs. But Marley wasn't exactly of that manly build that takes the chief and the captain by storm, and there were suggestions on his young old face that he had seen perhaps a trifle too much of life. So he wiped the sweat from his brow several times to the third-story landing, only to find as often that the expected vacancy was not yet. Meanwhile the tropical days slipped idly by, and Marley's standon, with the owners of the ICC hotel books, began to strain and threaten to break away, and everything sort of gave up the ghost and died. Everything, that is, except the winning smile. Till one afternoon, with only that asset left, Marley met the department head on the grass-boarded path in front of the Episcopal Chapel, just where the long descent ends, and a man begins to regain his practical mood, and said Marley, Say, look here chief, it's a question of eats with me. We can't put this thing off much longer, or… Which is why that evening's train carried Marley, with the police badge and the little flat volume bound in imitation leather in his pocket, out to some substation commander along the line for the corporal in charge to break in and hammer down into that finished product, his own policeman. Incidentally, Marley also illustrated some months later one of the special ways of getting off the force. It was still simpler. Going on pass, to Cologne to spend a little evening, Marley neglected to leave his number thirty-eight behind in the squad room, according to ZP rules, which was careless of him. For when his spirits reached that stage, where he recognized what sport it would be to see the spigotty policeman of Bottle Alley dance a western can-can, he bethought him of the number thirty-eight, which accounts for the fact his name of Marley can no longer be found on the rolls of the ZP. But all this is sadly anticipating. Obviously, you will say, a force recruiter from such a dissimilar sources must be a thing of wide and sundry experience. And obviously you are right. Could a man catch up the ZP by the slack of the khaki riding-breaches and shake out their stories as a giant in need of car fare might shake out their loose change? Then might he retire to some sunny hillside of his own and build him a soundproof house with a swimming-pool and a revolving bookcase and a stable of riding-horses, and cause to be erected on the front lawn a kneeling place, where publishers might come and bow down and beat their foreheads on the pavement. End of Chapter 5 Part 1 Recording by Todd Chapter 5 Part 2 of Zone Policeman 88 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Zone Policeman 88 A close-range study of the Panama Canal and its workers by Harry A. Frank. Chapter 5 Part 2 There are men in the ZP who in former years have played horse with the startled markets of great American cities. Men whose voices will boom forth in the pulpit and whisper sage counsels in the professional in years to come. Men whose doting parents have sent to Harvard, on whom it failed to take except on their clothes. Men who have gone down near to the valley of the shadow of death and crawled on hands and knees through the brackish red brook that runs at the bottom and come out against smiling on the brink above. Careers more varied than Mexican sombreros one might hear in any ZP squad room, or not the ZP so much more given to action than to autobiography. They bore little resemblance to what I had expected. My mental picture of an American policeman was that conglomerate average one unconsciously imbibes from a distant view of our city forces, and by comparison with foreign, a heavy-footed discordious, half fanatical, half irregular clubber whose wits are as slow as his judgment is honest. Instead of which I found the ZP composed almost without exception of good-hearted, well-set-up young Americans almost all of military training. I had anticipated from other experiences a constant bickering and a general striving to make life unendurable for a newcomer. Instead, I was constantly surprised at the good fellowship that existed throughout the force. There were, of course, some healthy rivalries—there were no angels among them—or I should have fled the isthmus much earlier, but for the most part, the ZP resembled nothing so much as a big happy family. Above all, I had expected early to make the acquaintance of Grafft, that shifty-eyed monster which we who have lived in large American cities think of as sitting down to dinner with the force at every mess hall. Grafft? Why, a zone policeman could not ride on a PRR train in full uniform when off duty without paying his fare, though he was expected to make arrests if necessary and stop behind with his prisoner. Compared, indeed, with almost any other spot on the broad earth's surface, Grafft eats slim meals on the canal zone. The average zone policeman would arrest his own brother, which is, after all, about the supreme test of good policehood. He is not a man who likes to keep blotters, make out accident reports and such things. That can be of interest only to those with clerks and bookkeepers' souls. He would far rather be battling with sun, man, and vegetation in the jungle. He is of those who genuinely and frankly have no desire to become rich and successful—a lack of ambition that formal society cannot understand and fancies a weakness. I had still another police surprise during these swivel-chair days. I discovered there was, on the zone, a yellow tailor who made Beau Bromwell uniforms at $7.50, compared with which the $5 ready-made ones were mere clothes. All my life long I had been laboring under the delusion that a uniform is merely a uniform, but one lives and learns. There are a few left, I suppose, who have not heard that gray-bearded story of the American and the Philippines who called his native servant and commanded, Juan Vafecha de Caballo from the Prado and—and—oh, Saddleman bridle him. Damn such a language anyway! I'm sorry I ever learned it. This is capped on the zone by another that is not only true but strikingly typical. An American boss who had been much annoyed by unforeseen absences of his workmen pounced upon one of his Spaniards one morning, crying, When you know, por la noche, that you're not going to troubaja por la manana, why in, don't you habla? See, senor, replied the Spaniard, by which it may be gathered that linguistic ability on the zone is on a par with that in any other U.S. possessions. Of the seven of us assigned a plain-closed duty on this strip of seventy-two nationalities, there was a Colombian, a gentleman of Swedish birth, a Chinaman from Martinique, and a Greek, all of whom spoke English, Spanish, and at least one other language. Of the three Native Americans, two spoke only their mother tongue. In the entire white uniformed force I met only Lieutenant Long and the Corporal in charge of Mia Flores, who could seriously be said to speak Spanish, though I am informed that there were one or two others. This was not for a moment any fault of the ZP. It comes back to our government and beyond that to the American people. With all our expanding over the surface of the earth in the past fourteen years, there still hangs over us that old Provincial Backwood's bogey, English, was good enough for me. We have only to recall what England does for those of her colonial servants who want seriously to study the language of some portion of her subjects to have something very like the blush of shame creep up the back of our necks. Child's task as is the learning of a foreign language. Provincial Old Uncle Sam just flat foots along in the same old way, expecting to govern and judge and lead along the path of civilization, his foreign colonies, by bellowing at them in his own nasal draw and treating their tongue as if it were some purely animal sound. He is well personified by Corporal Blank, late of the ZP. The Corporal had served three years in the Philippines and five on the zone, and could not ask for bread in the Spanish tongue. Why don't you learn it? Someone asked one day. Ah, draw the Corporal. What's the use of going to all that trouble? If you have to have an interpreter done, all you gotta do is to call in a nigger. Uncle Sam not merely lends his servants no assistance to learn the tongues of his colonies, but should one of his subjects appear bearing that extraordinary accomplishment, he gives him no preference whatever, no better position, not a co-percent more salary, and if things get to a pass where a linguist must be hired, he gives the job to the first citizen that comes along who could make a noise that is evidently not English, or more still likely to some foreigner who talks English like a mouthful of Hungarian goulash. It is not the least of the reasons why foreign nations do not take us as seriously as they ought, why our colonials do not love us, and, what is of far greater importance, do not advance under our rule as they should. Meanwhile, they had gradually been reaching me through the proper channels, as everything does on the zone even to our ice water, the various coupon books and the like indispensable to zone life and the proper pursuit of playing closed duty. Distressing as our statistics the full comprehension of what might follow requires the enumeration of the odds and ends I was soon caring about with me. A brass check, police badge, ICC hotel coupon book, commissary coupon book, 120 trip ticket, a booklet containing blank passes between any stations on the PRR to be filled out by holder, mileage book purchased by employees at half rates of two and a half cents a mile for use when traveling our personal business, 24 trip ticket, a free courtesy pass to all gold employees allowing one monthly round trip excursion over any portion of the line, freight train pass for the PRR, dirt train and locomotive pass for the Pacific Division, ditto for the Central Division, likewise for the Atlantic Division, in short about everything on wheels was free to the gum shoe except the yellow car, passes admitting to docks and steamers at either end of the zone, notebook, pencil or pen, report cards and envelopes, one of which the playing closed man must fill out and forward to headquarters via train guard whenever night might overtake him, the gum shoe's day's work as the idle uniformed man facetiously does it. Furthermore the man out of uniform is popularly supposed never to venture forth among the population without belt, holster, cartridges and the number 38 colt that reminds you of a drowning man trying to drag you down, handcuffs, police whistle, blackjack, officially he never carries this, theoretically there is not one on the isthmus, but the gum shoe naturally cannot twirl a police club and it is not always policy to shoot every refractory prisoner, then if he chances to be addicted to the weed there is the cigarette case and matches, a watch is frequently convenient and incidentally a few articles of clothing are more or less indispensable even in the dry season, now and again too a bit of money does not come amiss, for though the canal zone is a utopia where man lives by work coupons alone, the detective can never know at what moment his all embracing duties may not carry him away into the foreign land of Panama and even were that possibility not always staring him in the face in the words of Gorgona Red, you've got to have money for your booze, ain't ya, which seems also to be Uncle Sam's view of the matter, far and away more important than any of the plain clothes equipment thus far mentioned is the expense account, it is unlike the others in that it is not visible and tangible but a mere condition, a pleasant sensation like the consciousness of a good appetite or a useful fullness of life, the only reality is a form signed by the czar of the zone himself tucked away among ICC financial archives, that authorizes the man assigned a special duty in playing clothes to be reimbursed money expended in the pursuit of duty up to the sum of sixty dollars per month, although it is said that the interpretation of this privilege to the full limit is not unlikely to cause flames of light, thunderous rumblings and other natural phenomena in the vicinity of empire and Calabra, but please note further these expenditures may be only for cab or boat hire meals away from home and liquor and cigars, plainly this gumshoe should be a bachelor, fortunately however the proprietor of the expense account is not required personally to consume it each month, it is designed rather to win the esteem of bartenders, loosen the tongue of suspects, libate the thirsty stool pigeon and prime other accepted sources of information, but beware exceeding care and filling out the account of such expenditures at the month's end, carelessness leads a hunted life on the canal zone, take for example the slight error of my friend who having made such expenditure in Cologne by a slip of the pen, or to be nice of the typewriter, sent in among three score and ten items the following, February 4th two bottles beer, crystal ball, fifty cents, and in the course of time found said Vulture again on his desk with a marginal note of mild eyed wonder and more than idle curiosity in the handwriting of a man very high up indeed. Where can you buy beer and crystal ball? All this and more I learned in the swivel chair waiting for orders, reading the latest novel that had found its way to Ancon station, and receiving frequent assurances that I should be quite busy enough once I got started. Opposite set Lieutenant Long pouring choice bits of substation orders into the phone. Don't you believe it? That was no accident! He didn't lose everything he had in every pocket rolling around drunk in the street. He's been systematically frisked. So they frisked? Get on the job and look into it. For the Lieutenant was one of those scarce and enviable beings who can live with his subordinates as man to man, yet never find an ounce of his authority missing when authority is needed. Now and then a ZP story walled away the time. There was a side case of Corporal Blank in charge of Blank station. Early one Sunday afternoon the Corporal saw a Spaniard leading a goat along the railroad. Naturally the day was hot. The Corporal sent a policeman to arrest the inhuman wrench for cruelty to animals. When he had left the culprit weeping behind padlocks he went to inspect the goat, tied in the shade under the police station. Poor little beast, said the sympathetic Corporal as he sat before a generous pan of ice water fresh from the police station tank. The goat took one long eager grateful draft, turned over on his back, curled up like the sensitive plants of Panama jungles when a finger touches them and departed this veil of tears. But Corporal Blank was an artist of the first rank. Not only did he get away with it under the very frowning battlements of the judge, but sent the Spaniard up for ten days on the charge against him. ZPs who tell the story assert that the Spaniard did not so much mind the sentence as the fact that the Corporal got his goat. Then there was the mystery of the knocked out knickers. Day after day there came reports from a spot out along the line that some negro laborer strolling along in a perfectly reasonable manner suddenly lay down through a fit and went into a comatose state from which he recovered only after a day or two in Ancon or Cologne hospitals. The doctors gave it up in despair. As a last resort, the case was turned over to a ZP sleuth. He chose himself a hiding place as near as possible to locality of the strange manifestation. For half the morning he swoltered and swore without having seen or heard the slightest thing of interest to an old zoner. A dirt train rumbled by now and then. He strove to amuse himself by watching the innocent games of two little Spaniard-switch boys not far away. They were enjoying themselves, as guileless childhood would, between their duties of letting a train in or out of the switch. Well on in the second half of the morning another diminutive Ibarian, a water boy, brought his compatriots a pail of water and carried off the empty bucket. The boys hung over the edge of the pail a sort of wire hook, the handle of their homemade drinking can, no doubt, and went on playing. By and by a burly black Jamaican in shirt sleeves loomed up in the distance. Now and then, as he advanced, he sang a snatch of West Indian Ballad. As he aspired the switch arrows, a smile broke out on his features and he hastened forward, his eyes fixed on the water pail. In a working species of Spanish, he made some request to the boys, the while wiping his ebony brow with his sleeve. The boys protested. Evidently they had lived in the zone so long they had developed a color line. The negro pleaded. The boys, sitting in the shade of their wigwam, still shook their heads. One of them was idly tapping the ground with a broom handle that had laid beside him. The negro glanced up and down the track, snatched up the boy's drinking vessel, of which the wire looped over the pail was not, after all, the handle, and stooped to dip up a can of water. The little fellow with the broomstick, ceasing a useless protest, reached a bit forward and tapped adreamily the rail in front of him. The Jamaican suddenly sent a can of water, some rods down the track, danced an artistic buck-and-wing shuffle on the thin air above his head, sat down on the back of his neck, and after trying a moment in vain, to kick the railroad out by the roots, lay still. By this time, the sleuth was examining the broom handle. From its split end protruded an inch of telegraph wire, which tanced also to be the same wire that hung over the edge of the galvanized bucket. Close in front of the innocent little fellows ran the third rail. Then suddenly this life of anecdote and leisure ended. There was thrust into my hands a typewritten sheet, and I cut the next thing on wheels out to Corazelle for my first investigation. It was one of the most commonplace cases on the zone. Two residents of my first dwelling place on the Isthmus had reported the loss of $150 in U.S. gold. Easier burglary than this the world does not offer. Every batch or quarters on the Isthmus, completely screened in, is entered by two or three screened doors, none of which is or can be locked. In the buildings are from 12 to 24 wide open rooms of two or three occupants each, no three of whom know one another's full names or anything else, except they are white Americans and Episofacto, so runs own philosophy, above dishonesty. The quarters are virtually abandoned during the day. Two Negro genitors dotted all about the building, but they too leave it for two hours at midday. Moreover, each of the 48 or more occupants probably has several friends or acquaintances or enemies who may drift in looking for them at any hour of the day or night. No Negro genitor would venture to question the white man's errand in a house. Panama is below the Mason and Dixon line. In practice any white American is welcome in any batch or quarters and even to a bed, if there is one unoccupied, though he be a total stranger to all the community. Add to this that the Negro-Taylor's runner often has permission to come while the owner is away for suits and neopressing, that John Chinaman must come and claw the week's washing out from under the bed where the roughneck kicked it on Saturday night, that there are a dozen other legitimate errands that bring persons of varying shades into the building, and above all that the bachelors themselves, after the open-hearted old American fashion, have the all but universal habit of tossing gold and silver, reward watches and real estate bonds, or anything else of whatever value, indifferently on the first clear corner that presents itself. Precaution is troublesome and un-American. It seems a fling at the character of your fellow bachelors, and in the vast majority of zone cases it would be. But it is in no sense surprising that among the many thousands that swarm upon the Isthmus there should be some not adverse to increasing their income by taking advantage of these guileless habits and bucolic conditions. There are suggestions that a few, not necessarily whites, make a profession of it. No wonder our chief trouble is burglary, and has been ever since the ZP can remember. Summed up, the payday gold that has thus faded away is perhaps no small amount, compared with what it might have been under prevailing conditions it is little. As for detecting such valonies, police officers the world around know that theft of coin to the realm in not too great quantities is virtually as safe a profession as the ministry. The ZP plainclothes man, like his fellows elsewhere, must usually be content in such cases with impressing on the victim his sure-locking in astuteness, gathering the available facts of the case, and return to type-write his reports thereof to be carefully filed away among headquarters archives. Which is exactly what I had to do in the case in question, diving out the door notebook in hand to catch the evening train to Panama. I was growing accustomed to Ancon, and even to Ancon police mess when I strolled into headquarters on Saturday the 16th, and the inspector flung a casual remark over his shoulder. Better get yourself together. You're transferred to Gauton. I was already stepping into a cab and route for the evening train when the inspector chanced down the hill. New Gauton is pretty bad on Saturday nights, he remarked. All too well I remembered the first time a nigger starts anything, run him in, and take all the witnesses in sight along. That reminds me, I haven't been issued a gun or handcuffs yet, I hinted. Hell's fire, no? queried the inspector. Tell the station commander at Gauton to fix you up. End of Chapter 5 Part 2 Recording by Todd Chapter 6 Part 1 of Zone Policeman 88 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Kay Hand Zone Policeman 88, a close-range study of the Panama Canal and its workers, by Harry A. Frank Chapter 6 Part 1 I scribbled myself a ticket and was soon rolling northward, greeting acquaintances at every station. The zone is like Egypt, whoever moves must travel by the same route. At Pedro Miguel and Cascadas, armies of locomotives, the mules of the man from Arkansas, stood steaming and panting in the twilight after their day's labor and the wild race homeward under hungry engineers. As far as Basavispo, this busy teaming isthmus seemed a native land. Beyond was like entering into foreign exile. It is common zone experience that only the locality one lives in during his first week ever feels like home. Throughout, too, was a new one. From Gorgona, the train returned crab-wise through Matachine and across the sandy dyke that still holds the chagras out of the cut, and halted at Gamboa Cabin. Day was dying as we rumbled on across the iron bridge above the river and away into the fresh jungle night along the rock ballasted relocation. The stillness of this less inhabited half of the zone settled down inside the car and out, the evening air of summer caressing almost roughly through the open windows. The train continued its steady way almost uninterruptedly. For though new villages were springing up to take the place of the old, sinking into desuitude and the flood along with the abandoned line, there were but two where once were eight. We paused at the new Frijoles and the boxcarred town of Montelerio, and, skirting on a higher level with a wide detour on the flanks of thick, jungled and forested hills, what is someday to be Gatun Lake, drew up at 7.30 at Gatun. I wandered and inquired for some time in a black night, for the moon was on the graveyard shift that week, before I found Gatun police station on the nose of a breezy knoll. But for Davy, the desk man, who it turned out was also to be my roommate, and a few wistful eyed negroes in the steel barred room in the center of the building, the station was deserted. Circus said the desk man briefly. When I mentioned the matter of weapons, he merely repeated the word with the further information that only the station commander could issue them. There was nothing to do therefore but to ramble out armed with a lead pencil into a virtually unknown town riotous with liquor and negroes and the combination of Saturday night, circus time, and the aftermath of payday, and to strut back and forth in a way to suggest that I was a perambulating arsenal. But though I wandered a long two hours into every hole and corner where trouble might have its breeding place, nothing but noise took place in my sight and hearing. I turned disgustedly away toward the tents pitched in a grassy valley between the two Gatuns. At least there was a faint hope that the Equestrian might assault the Ringmaster. I approached the tent flap with a slightly quickening pulse. Worldwide and centuries old as is the experience, personally I was about to spring my badge for the first time. Suppose the doortender should refuse to honor it and force me to impress upon him the importance of the ZP. Without a gun? Outwardly nonchalant I strolled in between the two ropes. Proprietor's ship looked up from counting his winnings and opened his mouth to shout, Ticket! I flung back my coat and with a nod and a half wink of wisdom he fell back again to computing his lawful gains. By the way, are not you who read curious to know, even as I for long years wondered, where a detective wears his badge? No, then, that long and profound investigation among the ZP seems to prove conclusively that as a general and all but invariable rule he wears it pinned to the lining of his coat or under his lapel or on the band of his trousers or on the breast of his shirt or in his hip pockets or up his sleeve or at home on the piano or riding around at the end of a string in the baby's nursery, though as is the case of all rules this one too has his exceptions. Entertainment's come rarely to gatun. The one-ringed circus was packed with every grade of society from gaping Spanish laborers to haughty wives of dirt-train conductors, among whom it was not hard to distinguish in a far corner the uniformed sergeant in command of gatun and the long-ling corporal tied in a bow-line knot at the alleged wit of the versatile but solitary clown who changed his tongue every other moment from English to Spanish. But the end was already near. Excitement was rising to the finale of a performance, a wrestling match between a circus man and Andy of Pedro Miguel Locke's. By the time I found a leaning place it was on. And the circus man, of course, was conquered amid the gleeful howling of rough necks, who collected considerable sums of money and went off shouting into the black knight in quest of a place where it might be spent quickly. It would be strange indeed if among all the thousands of men in the prime of life who are digging the canal at least one could not be found who could subjugate any champion a wandering circus could carry among its properties. I took up again the random tramping in the dark unknown night till it was two o'clock of a Sunday morning when at last I dropped my report card in the train guard box and climbed upstairs to the cot opposite Davy, sleeping the silent untroubled sleep of a babe. I was barely settled in gatun when the train guard handed me one of those frequent typewritten orders calling for the arrest of some straggler or deserter from the marine camp of the tenth infantry. That very morning I had seen the boss of census days off on his vacation to the states, from which he might not return. In here I was coldly and preemptorily called to go forth and arrest and deliver to Camp Elliot on its hill, Mack, the pride of the census, with a promise of $25 reward for the trouble. Mack, dessert? It was to laugh, but naturally after six weeks of unceasing repetition of that pink set of questions, Mack's throat was a bit dry and he could scarcely be expected to return it once to the humdrum life of Camp without spending a bit of that $5 a day in slaking a tropical thirst. Indeed I question whether any but the Prudish will loudly blame Mack even because he spent it a bit too freely and brought up in Empire dispensary. Word of his presence there soon drifted down to the wily plainclothes man of Empire District, but it was a hot noon day, the dispensary lies somewhat uphill and the uniformless officer of the Zone Metropolis is rather thickly built. Wherefore, stowing away this private bit of information under his hat, he told himself with a yawn, oh, I'll drag him in later in the day, and drifted down to a wide open door on Railroad Avenue to spend a bit of the $25 reward in offsetting the heat. Meanwhile Mack, feeling somewhat recovered from his financial extravagance, came sauntering out of the dispensary and seeing his curly-headed friend strolling a beat not far away, naturally cried out, hello, Eck, and what could Eck say, being a reputable Zone policeman, but why hello, Mack, how they frame it up, consider yourself pinched. Which was lucky for Mack, for Eck had once worn a marine hat over his own right eye, and he knew from melancholy experience that the $25 was no government generosity, but Mack's own involuntarily contribution to his finding and delivery so managed to slip most of it back into Mack's hands. Long, long after, more than six weeks after, in fact, I chanced to be in Bossabispo with a half hour to spare and climbed to the flowered and many-roaded camp on its far-viewing hilltop that falls sheer away on the east into the canal. In one of the airy barracks I found Rensen, cards in hand, clear-skinned, and fit now, thanks to the regular life of this adult nursery, though his lost youth was gone for good. And Mack? Yes, I saw Mack, too, or at least the back of his head and shoulders through the screen of the guardhouse where Rensen pointed him out to me as he was being locked up again after a day of shoveling sand. The first days in Gatun called for little else than patrol duty, without fixed hours, interspersed with an occasional loaf on the second story veranda of the police station overlooking the giant locks. Close at hand was the entrance to the canal, up which came slowly barges loaded with crushed stone from Porto Bello Quarry, 20 miles east along the coast, or sand from Nombre de Dios, twice as distant, while further still spread limombe from which swept a never-ending breeze one could wipe dry as on a towel. So long as he has in his pocket no typewritten report with the inspector's scrawl across it, for investigation and report, the plain clothesman is virtually his own commander, with few duties beside, trying to be in as many parts of his district at once as possible, and the ubiquitous duty of keeping in touch with headquarters. So I wandered and mangled with all the life of the vicinity exactly as I should have done had I not been paid a salary to do so. By day, one could watch the growth of the great locks, the gradual drowning of little green, new-made islands beneath the muddy still waters of Gatun Lake, tramp out along jungle-flanked country roads, through the Mindy Hills, or down below the old railroad, to where the kayukas that floated down the chagras laden with fruit came to land on the ever-advancing edge of the waters. With night things grew more compact. From twilight till after midnight I prowled in and out through New Gatun, spilled far and wide over at several hills, watching the antics of knee-grows, pausing to listen to their guitars and their boisterous merriment, with an eye and ear ever open for the unlawful. When I drifted into a saloon to see who might be spending the evening out, the bartender proved he had the advantage of me in acquaintance by crying, �Hello, Frank, what's you having?� and showing great solicitude that I get it. After which I took up the starlet tramp again to run perhaps into some such perilous scene as on that third evening. A riot of contending voices rose from a building back in the center of a block, with now and then the sickening thump of a falling body. I approached noiselessly, likewise weaponless, peeped in and found, four negro bakers stripped to the waist, industriously kneading tomorrow's bread, and discussing in profoundest earnest the object of the Lord in creating mosquitoes. Beyond the native town, as an escape from all this, there was the back country road that wound for a mile through the fresh night and the droning jungle, yet instead of leading off into the wilderness of the interior, swung around to American gatoon on its close-cropped hills. I awoke one morning to find my name bulletin'd among those ordered to report for target test. A fine piece of luck was this for a man who had scarcely fired a shot since, aged ten, he wrought down with an airgun, an occasional sparrow at three cents ahead. We took the afternoon train to Mount Hope on the edge of Cologne, and trooped away to a little plain behind Monkey Hill, the last resting place of many a zoner. The Cristobal Lieutenant, Father of ZP, was in charge, and here again was that same ZP absence of false dignity and the genuine good fellowship that makes the success of your neighbor as pleasing as your own. Shall I borrow a gun, Lieutenant? I asked when I found myself on deck. Well, you'll have to use your own judgment as to that, replied the Lieutenant, busy pasting stickers over the holes in the target. The test was really very simple. All you had to do was cling to one end of a Number 38 horse pistol, point it at the bull's eye of a target, hold it in that position until you had put five bullets into said bull's eye, repeat that twice at growing distances, mortally wound ten times the image of a martinique negro running back and forth across the field, and you had a perfect score. Only, simple as it was, none did it, not even old soldiers, with two or three hitches in the army. So I had to be content with creeping in on the second page of a seven page list of all the tested force from the chief to the latest negro recruit. The next evening I drifted into the police station to find a group of laborers from the adjoining camps awaiting me on the veranda bench because the desk man didn't sabay their lingo. They proved upon examination to be two Italians and a Turk, and their story short, sad, by no means unusual. Upon returning from work one of the Italians had found the lock hinges of his ponderously padlocked tin trunk hanging limp and screwless, and his payday roll of some thirty dollars missing from the crown of a hat stuffed with a shirt securely packed away in the deepest corner thereof. The Turk was similarly unable to account for the absence of his thirty three dollars savings safely locked the night before inside a paste poured suitcase, unless the fact that, thanks to some sort of surgical operation, one entire sight of the grip now swung open like a barn door might prove to have something to do with the case. The thirty three dollars had been, for further safety sake, in Panamanian silver, suggesting a burglar with a wheelbarrow. The mysterious detective work began at once, without so much putting on a false beard I repaired to the scene of the nefarious crime. It was a usual zone type of laborer's barracks, a screened building of one huge room. It contained two double rows of three-tier, standy, canvas bunks on gas pipes. Around the entire room, close under the sheet iron roof, ran a wooden platform or shelf, reached by a ladder, and stacked high with the tin trunks, misshapen bundles, and pressed paper suitcases, containing the worldly possessions of the fifty or more workmen around the rough table below. Theoretically, not even an inmate thereof may enter a zone labor camp during working hours. Practically, the West Indian janitors, to whom is left the enforcement of this rule, are nothing if not fallible. In the course of the second day, I unearthed a second Turk who, having chanced the morning before to climb to the baggage shelf for his razor and soap, preparatory to welcoming a fellow countryman to the isthmus, had been mildly startled to step on the shoulder blade of a negro of given length and proportions lying prone behind the stacked up impedimenta. The latter explained both his presence in a white labor camp and his unconventional posture by asserting that he was the mosquito man, and shortly thereafter went away from there without leaving either card or a dress. By all my library training and detective work, the next move obviously was to find what color of cigarette ashes the Turk smoked. Instead, I blundered upon the absurdly simple notion of trying to locate the negro of given length and proportions. The real mosquito man, one of that dark band that spends its zone years with a wire hook and a screened bucket gathering evidence against the defenseless mosquito for the sanitary department to gloat over, was found not to fit the model even in hue. Moreover, mosquito men are not accustomed to carry their devotion to duty to the point of crawling under trunks in their quest. For a few days following, the hunt led me through all gattune and vicinity. Now I found myself racing across the narrow plank bridges above the yawning gulf of the locks with far below tiny men and toy trains, now in and out among the cathedral-like flying buttresses under the giant arches past staring signs of danger on every hand, as if one could not plainly hear its presence without the posting. I descended to the very floor of the locks far below the earth and tramped the long half mile of the three flights between the soaring concrete walls. Above me rose the great steel gates standing ajar and giving one the impression of an opening in the great wall of china or of a skyscraper about to be swung lightly aside. On them resounded the roar of the compressed air riveters and all the way up the sheer faces, growing smaller and smaller as they neared the sky, were meclintic marshal men driving into place red-hot rivets thrown at them viciously by negroes at the forges and glaring-like comet's tails against the twilight void. The chase sent me more than once, stumbling away across rock-tumbled gattune dam that squats its vast bulk where for long centuries, eighty-five feet below, was the village of Old Gattune, with its proud church and its checkered history, where Morgan and Peruvian viceroys and 49ers were wont to pause from their arduous journeyings. They call it a dam. It is rather a range of hills, a part and portion of the highlands that east and west enclose the valley of the chagras, its summit resembling the terminal yards of some great city. There was one day when I saw a negro breakman attached to a given locomotive. I climbed to a yardmaster's tower above the spillway and the yardmaster, taking up his powerful field glasses, swept the horizon, or rather the dam, and discovered the engine for me as a mariner discovers an island at sea. Or would you be kind enough to tell us where we can find this gattune dam we've heard so much about? Asked a party of four tourists, half and half as to sex, who had been wandering about on it for an hour or so with puzzled expressions of countenance. They addressed themselves to a busy civil engineer in leather leggings and rolled-up shirtsleeves. I'm sorry I haven't time to use the instrument, replied the engineer over his shoulder, while he wigwagged his orders to his negro helpers scattered over the landscape. But nearly as I can tell with the naked eye you are now standing in the exact center of it. The result of all this sweating and sightseeing was that some days later there was gathered in a young Barbadian who had been living for months in and about gattune without any visible source of income whatever, not even a wife. The Turk and the camp janitor identified him as the culprit. But the primer lesson the police recruit learns is that it is one thing to believe a man guilty and quite another to convince a judge, the most skeptical being known to zoology, of that perfectly apparent fact. With the suspect behind bars, therefore, I continued my underground activities with the result that when at length I took the train to new gattune one morning for the courtroom in Cristobal. I loaded into a second class coach, six witnesses aggregating five nationalities ready to testify among other things to the interesting little point that the defendant had a long prison record in Barbados. End of Chapter 6, Part 1. Chapter 6, Part 2 of Zone Policemen 88. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Kay Hand. Zone Policemen 88, a close range study of the Panama Canal and its workers by Harry A. Frank. Chapter 6, Part 2. When the echo of the black policeman's oye-oye had died away and the little white-haired judge had taken his bench, I made the discovery that I was present in not one, but in four capacities, as a resting officer, complainant, interpreter, and to a large extent prosecuting attorney. To swear a Turk who spoke only Turkish through another Turk, who mangled a little Spanish for a judge who would not recognize a non-American word from the voice of a steam shovel with a solemn so-helmy god to clinch and strengthen it when the witness was a follower of the prophet of Medina or nobody, was not without its possibilities of humor. The trial proceeded. The witnesses witnessed in their various tongues. The perspiring arresting officer reduced their statements to the common denominator of the judge's single tongue and the smirking bullet-head defendant was hopelessly buried under evidence. Wherefore, when the shining black face of his lawyer retained during the two minutes between the oye and the opening of the case rose above the scene to purr, your honor, the prosecution is shown no case. I move the charge against my client bequashed. I choke myself just in time to keep from gasping aloud while of all the nerve. Never will I learn that the lawyer's profession admits lying on the same footing with truth in the defense of the culprit. Cause, shown, mumbled the judge without looking up from his writing, defendant bound over for trial in the circuit court. A week later, therefore, there was a similar scene, a story higher in the same building. Here, on Thursdays, sits one of the three members of the zone supreme court. Jury trial is rare on the Isthmus, which makes possibly for sure justice. This time there was all the machinery of court and I appeared only in my legal capacity. The judge, a man still young, with an astonishingly mobile face that changed at least once a minute from furrowy scowl with great pouting lips to a smile so broad it startled, sat in state in the middle of three judicial armchairs, and the case proceeded. Within an hour the defendant was standing up, the cheery grin still on his black countenance, to be sentenced to two years and eight months in his own penitentiary at Kulebra. A deaf man would have fancied he was being awarded some prize. One of the never-ending surprises on the zone is the apparent indifference of negro prisoners, whether they get years or go free. Even if they testify on their own behalf, it is in a listless, detached way, as if the matter were of no importance anyway. But the glands they throw at the innocent arresting officer as they pass out on their way to the barbed wire enclosure on the outskirts of the zone capital tells another story. There are members of the ZP who sleep with a gun under their pillow because of that look or a muttered word. But even where I nervous I should have been little disturbed at the glare in this case, for it will probably be a long walk from Kulebra penitentiary to where I am 32 months from that morning. A holiday air brooded over all Gatun and the countryside. Workmen in freshly washed clothing lulled in the shade of labor camps. Black Britishers were gathering in flat meadows fitted for the national game of cricket. Far and wide sounded the carefree laughter and chattering of negroes, while even within Gatun police station, leisure and peace seemed almost in full possession. The morning touch with headquarters over, therefore, I scrambled away across the silent yawning locks and the trainless and workless dam to the spillway, over which already some overflow from the lake was escaping to the Caribbean. My friend, Dusty and H, had carried their canoe to the chagras below, and before nine we were off down the river. It was a day that all the world north of the Tropic of Cancer could not equal. Just the weather for a perfect day off. A plain closed man it is true is not supposed to have days off. Someone might run away with the administration building on the edge of the Pacific and the telephone wires be buzzing for me. With the sad results that a few days later there would be posted in zone police stations where all who turned the leaves might read. Special order number. Having been found guilty of charges of neglect of duty, preferred against him by his commanding officer, first class policeman number 88 is hereby fined two dollars, chief of division. But shades of John Aspinwall should even in detective work on such a Sunday, surely no criminal would, least of all a black one. Moreover, these forest walled banks were also part of my beat. The sun was hot, yet the air of that ozone-rich quality for which Panama is famous. For headgear we had caps and did not wear those, though barely a few puffy snow white clouds ventured out into the vast chartless sky all the brilliant day through. Then the river, who could describe this lower reach of the chagras as it curves its seven deep and placid miles from where Uncle Sam releases it from custody to the ocean. Its jungled banks were without a break for the one or two clusters of thatch and reed huts along the way are but a part of the living vegetation. Now and then we had glimpses across the treetops of brilliant green jungle hills farther inland, everywhere were huge splendid trees, the stack shaped mango, the soldier erect palm, heavy yet unburdened with coconuts. Some fish resembling the porpoise rose here and there, back and forth above the shadows, winged snow white cranes so slender one wondered the sea breeze did not wreck them. Above all the quiet and peace and contentment of a perfect tropical day enfolded the landscape in a silence only occasionally disturbed by the cry of a passing bird. Once a gasoline launch deep laden with Sunday-starched Americans snorted by, bound likewise to Fort Lorenzo at the river's mouth, and we lay back in our soft, rumpled khaki and drowsily smiled our sympathy after them. When they had drawn out of earshot life began to return to the banks and nature again took possession of the scene. Alligators abounded once on this lower chagras but they have grown scarce now or shy and though we sat with age's automatic rifle across our knees in turns we saw no more than a carcass or a skeleton on the bank at the foot of the sheer wall of impenetrable verger. Till that length the sea opened on our site through the alleyway of jungle and a broad inviting coconut grove nodded and beckoned on our left. Instead we paddled out across the sandbar to play with the surf of the Atlantic but found it safer to return and glide across the little bay to the drowsy straw and tin village. Here, for the mouth of the chagras like its source lies in a foreign land, a solitary panamanian policeman in the familiar arctic uniform enticed us toward the little thatched office and house and swinging hammock of the Alcalde to register our names in our business had we any. So deep-rooted was the serenity of the place that even when dusty, in all-zone innocence, addressed the white-haired little mulatto as hombre, he lost neither his dignity nor his temper. The policeman and a brown boy of merry breed went with us up the grassy rise to the old fort. In its musty vaulted dungeons were still the massive rust corroded irons for feet and the neck of prisoners of the old brutal days, blind owls stared upon us, once the boy brought down with his Honda or Slungshot, one of the bats that circled uncannily above our heads. In dank corners were mounds of worthless powder, the bakery that once fed the miserable dungeon dwellers had crumbled in upon itself. Outside great trees straddled and split the massive stone walls that once commanded the entrance to the chagras. Jungle waved in undisputed possession in its earth-filled moat. Even the old cannon and heaped-up cannonballs lay rust-eaten and ejected, like decrepit old men who had long since given up the struggle. We came out on the nose of the fort bluff, and had before and below us and underfoot all the old famous scene. For centuries the beginning of all trans-isman travel. The scalloped surf washed shore with its dwindling palm groves curving away into the west, the chagras pushing off into the jungled land. We descended to the beach of the outer bay and swam in the salt sea, and the policeman, scorning the launch-party, squatted a long hour in the shade of a tree above in tropical patience. Then, with sour oranges for thirst and nothing for hunger, for Lorenzo has no restaurant, we turned to paddle our way homeward up the chagras. That bears the salt taste of the sea clear to the spillway. Once one verse only of a stanza by the late bard of the isthmus struck a false note on our ears. Then go away if you have to, then go away if you will. To again return you will always yearn while the lamp is burning still. You've drunk the chagras water and the mango eaten free, and strange though it seems it will haunt your dreams this land of the coconut tree. No catastrophe had befallen during my absence. The same peaceful sunny Sunday rained a gatoon. New laundered laborers were still lulling in the shade of the camps. West Indians were still batting at interminable balls with their elongated paddles and the faint hope of deciding the national game before darkness settled down. Then twilight fell and I set off through the rambling town already boisterous with church services. Before the little substation a swarm of negroes was pounding tambourines and bawling lustily. Oh, you must be a lover of delard, or you can't get to heaven when you die. Further on a lady, who would have made Ebony seem light gray, bowed over an organ, while a burly Jamaican blacker than the night outside stood in the vestments of the Church of England, telling his version of the case in a voice that echoed back from the town across the gully, as if he would drown out all rival sex and arguments by volume of sound. The meeting house on the next corner was thronged with a singing multitude, tambourines scattered among them and all clapping hands to keep time, even to the pastor, who let the momentum carry on and on into verse after verse as if he had not the self-sacrifice to stop it, while outside in the warm night another crowd was gathered at the edge of the shadows gazing as at a vaudeville performance. How well fitted are the various brands of Christianity to the particular likings of their flocks. The strong outward manifestation of the religion of the West Indian Black is this boisterous singing. All over town were dusky throngs exercising their strong untrained voices in the large service, though the West Indian is not noted as being musical. Here a preacher wanting suddenly to emphasize a point or clinch an argument swung an arm like a college cheerleader and the entire congregation roared forth with him some well-known hymn that settled the question for all time. I strolled on into darker High Street. Suddenly on a veranda above there broke out a wild unearthly screaming. Two Negroes were engaged in savage, sanguinary combat. Around them in the dim light, thrown by a cheap tenement lamp, I could make out their murderous weapons, machetes or great bars of iron, slashing wildly, while above the din rose screams and curses, yo, badge again, I kill you. I sped stealthily yet swiftly up the long steps drawing my number 38, for at last I had been issued one. As I ran and dashed into the heart of the turmoil, swallowing my tendency to shout, unhand him, villain, and crying instead, Here, what the devil's going on here? Whereupon two Negroes let fall at once to pine sticks and turned upon me their broad, childish grins with. We only play in Tsar, play in single sticks, which we learn to the army in Barbados, sergeant. Thus I wandered on in and out, till the night lost its youth, and the last train from Cologne had dumped its merry crowd at the station, then wound away along the still and deserted back road through the night-chirping jungle, between the two surviving gatoons. There was a spot behind the division engineer's hill that I rarely succeeded in passing without pausing to drink in the scene, a scallop in the hills where several trees stood out singly and alone against the myriad starlit sky, below and beyond the indistinct valleys and ravines, from which came up out of the night the chorus of the jungle. Further on, in American gatoon, there was a seat on the steps before a bungalow that offered more than a good view in both directions. A broad U.S. tamed ravine sank away in front, across which the Atlantic breeze wafted the distance softened thromb of guitar, the tones of fife's and happy Negro voices, while overhead feathery gray clouds as concealing as a dancer's gossamer hurried leisurely by across the brilliant face of the moon. To the right, in a free space, the southern cross tilted a bit awry, gleamed as it has these untold centuries, while ephemeral humans come and pass their brief way. It was somewhere near here that Gatoons' dry season mosquito had his hiding place. Rumor whispers of some such letter as the following received by the Colonel, not the blue-eyed czar at Culebra this time. For you must know, there is another Colonel on the zone, every wit as indispensable in his sphere. Gatoon, 26th, 1912. Dear Colonel, I am writing to call your attention to a gross violation of sanitary ordinance number 3621 to an apparent loophole in your otherwise excellent department. The circumstances are as follows. On the evening of 24th, as I was sitting at the roadside between Gatoon and New Gatoon, some 63 paces beyond House 226, there appeared a mosquito, which buzzed openly and for some time about my ears. It was probably merely a male of the species as it showed no tendency to bite, but a mosquito nevertheless. I trust you will take fitting measures to punish so bold and insolent a violation of the rules of your department. I am, sir, very truly yours, Mrs. Henry Peck. He asked the mosquito might easily be recognized by a particularly triumphant defiant note in its song. I cannot personally vouch for the above, but if it was received any zoner will assure you that prompt action was taken. It is well so. The French failed to dig the canal because they could not down the mosquito. Of course there was the champagne and the other things that come with it later in the night, but after all it was the little songful mosquito that drove them into disgrace back across the Atlantic. Still further on toward the hotel and a midnight lunch, there was one house that was usually worth lingering before, though good music is rare on the zone. Then there was the naughty poker game in Bachelor Quarter's number, well never mind that detail, to keep an ear on in case the pot grew large enough to make a worthwhile violation of the law that would warrant the summoning of the mounted policeman. Meanwhile, cases stacked up about me. Now one took me out the hard U.S. highway, but once out of sight of the last Negro shanty rambles erratically off like the reminiscences of an old man through the half-cleared, mostly uninhabited wilderness, rampant green with rooted life and almost noisy with the songs of birds. Eventually within a couple of hours it crossed Fox River with its little settlement and descended to Mount Hope police station, where there is a phone with which to get in touch again and then a mission rocker on the screen veranda where the breezes of the nearby Atlantic will have you well cooled off before you can catch the shuttle train back to Gatun. Or another let out across the lake by the old abandoned line that was the main line when first I saw Gatun. It drops down beyond the station and charges across the lake by a causeway that steam shovels were already devouring toward Forsaken Bohio. Picking its way across the rotting spiles of culverts, it pushed on through the unpeopled jungle, all the old railroad gone, rails, ties, the very spikes torn up and carried away. While already the parrots screamed again in derision as if it were they who had driven out the hated civilization and taken possession again of their own. A few short months and the devouring jungle will have swallowed up even the place where it has been. If it was only the little typewritten slip reporting the disappearance of a half dozen jacks from the dam, every case called for full investigation. For days to come I might fight my way through the encircling wilderness by tunnels of vegetation to every native hut for miles around to see if by any chance the lost property could have rolled thither. More than once such a hunt brought me out on the water tank knoll at the far end of the dam, overlooking miles of impenetrable jungle behind and above, chanting with a visible life, to the right filling the lake, stretching across to low blue ranges dimly outlined against the horizon and crowned by fantastic trees, and all Gatun and its immense works and workers below and before me. Times were when duty called me into the squalid red-lighted district of Cologne and kept me there till the last train was gone. Then there was nothing left but to pick my way through the night, out along the PRR tracks to shout in at the yardmaster's window, how soon you got anything going up the line, and according to the answer, return to read an hour or two in crystal ball YMCA or push on at once into the forest of boxcars to hunt out the lighted caboose. Night freight do not stop at Gatun, nor anywhere merely to let off a gum shoe, but just beyond New Gatun station is a grade that sets the Negro firemen to sweating even at midnight and the big mogul to straining every nerve and sinew, and I did not meet the engineer that could drag his long load by so swiftly, but that one could easily swing off on the road that leads to the police station. Even on the rare days when cases gave out, there was generally something to wild away the monotony. As one morning, an American widely known in Gatun was arrested on a warrant, and chatting merrily with his friend policeman, Blank, strolled over to the station. There his friend Corporal Macy subdued his broad Irish smile and ordered the deskman to book him up. The latter was reaching for the keys to a cell when the American broke off his pleasant flow of conversation to remark, all right corporal, I'm going over to the house to get a few things and write a few letters, I'll be back inside of an hour. Whereupon Corporal Macy, being a man of iron self-control, refrained from turning a double back somersault and mildly called the prisoner's attention to a little point of his own police roles he had overlooked. If every other known form of amusement absolutely failed, it was still the dry or tourist season, and poured down from the state hordes of unconscious comedians or investigators who rushed two whole days about the isthmus, taking care not to get into any dirty places and rushed home again to tell an eager public all about it. Sometimes the sightseers came from the opposite end of the earth, a little band of South Americans in tongueless awe at the undreamed monster of work about them, yet struggling to keep their fancied despite of the Yankee, to which the Yankee is so serenely indifferent. Priests from this Southland were especially numerous. The week never passed that a group of them might not be seen peering over the dizzy precipice of gatoon locks and crossing themselves ostentatiously as they turned away. One does not, at least in a few months, feel the sameness of climate at Panama and long again to see spring grow out of winter. There is something, perhaps, in the popular belief that even Northern energy evaporates in this tropical land. It is not exactly that, but certainly many a zoner wakes up day by day with ambitious plans and just drifts the day through with the fine weather. He fancies himself as strong and energetic as in the North, yet when the time comes for doing he is apt to say, oh I guess I'll loaf here in the shade half an hour longer, and before he knows it another whole day is charged up against his meager credit column with father time. There came the day early in April when the inspector must go north on his 42 days vacation. I bade him bon voyage on board the 841 between the two gatoons and soon afterward was throwing together my belongings and leaving Davy to enjoy his room alone. For Corporal Castillo was to be head of the subterranean department at Interim, and how could the digging of the canal continue with no detective in all the wilderness of morals between the Pacific and Culebra. Thus it was that the afternoon train bore me away to the southward. It was a tourist train. A New York steamer had docked that morning, and the first class cars were packed with venture travelers in their stout campaign outfits with which to rough it, in the Tivioli and the sightseeing motors, in their roof like cork helmets and green veils for the terrible Panama heat, which is sometimes as bad as in northern New York. The PRR is one of the few railroads whose passengers may drop off for a stroll, let the train go on without them, and still take it to their destination. They have only to descend, as I did, at Gamboa Cabin, and wander down into the cut, climb leisurely out to Bassobisbo, and chat with their acquaintances among the marines, lulling about the station until the train puffs in from its shuttleback excursion to Gorgona. The zone landscape had lost much of its charm. For days past, jungle fires had been sweeping over it, doing the larger growth's small harm, but leaving little of the greenness in rank clinging life of other seasons. Everywhere were fires along the way, even in the towns. For quarter-masters to the rage of zone housewives were sending up in clouds of smoke the grass and brushes that quickly turned to breeding places of mosquitoes and disease with first rains. Night closed down as we emerged from Miraflores tunnel. Soon we swung around toward the houses, row upon row, and all alight, climbed the lower slope of Ancon Hill, and at seven I descended in familiar, cab-crowded, bawling Panama.